Secretary-General António Guterres praised the impactful first decade of the “Every Woman Every Child” campaign, which mobilized more than $180 billion in investments. While maternal and child deaths have declined significantly in that time, he cautioned that COVID-19 has revealed the fragility of those advances.
Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message to the closing session of the Virtual Commonwealth Learning Week today:
The Elsie Initiative, a United Nations Trust Fund that supports deployment of uniformed women to peace operations, announced this morning its first five recipients — Liberia, Mexico, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone — during a high-level virtual event. The Fund also launched its second programming round.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said it will launch an operation to reach up to 2 million vulnerable people in Myanmar’s main cities and other areas where people have recently been uprooted. WFP estimates that 3.4 million more people will be hungry within the next six months, amid the ongoing effects of poverty, COVID-19 and political crisis.
Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohamed’s video message for the high-level dialogue on Increasing Women’s Participation in Electoral Processes and Addressing Violence against Women in Elections, held today:
Following is UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ message for International Girls in ICT Day 2021, observed on 22 April:
Nearly half of women in 57 developing countries are denied the right to decide whether to have sex with their partners, use contraception or seek health care, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2021 flagship “State of World Population” report, released today.
Facing pandemic lockdowns, spiking violence and eroded access to services and legal protections, women in war zones continue to suffer and global commitments remain largely unmet, the United Nations senior official on sexual violence in conflict told the Security Council today, calling for a “paradigm shift” in how resources are allocated in the post-COVID-19 world.
Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message at the presentation of the book Aisha Buhari: Being Different and the Summit on the Emerging Trend on the Role of the First Lady in National Development, today:
Following is UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks at the Generation Equality Forum in Mexico today:
The Commission on the Status of Women concluded its sixty-fifth session today, approving a wide-ranging set of agreed conclusions that broadly reaffirm the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action — adopted at the landmark fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 — as “crucial” to fulfilling the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pursuing gender equality cannot, and will not, be stopped by pandemics, sanctions, conflict, budget shortfalls or the perpetuation of conservative traditions, ministers and other Government representatives told the Commission on the Status of Women during a videoconference meeting on the penultimate day of its sixty-fifth session.
Domestic violence hotlines and programmes aimed at closing gender pay gaps are among an array of tools several States are using to integrate women’s empowerment into national sustainable development strategies, delegates told the Commission on the Status of Women, as it continued its sixty-fifth session with an interactive dialogue and general discussion.
The Commission on the Status of Women continued its sixty-fifth session today, with policymakers from Algeria, Mongolia, Egypt, Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates presenting national achievements in building out the normative, legal and policy frameworks essential for supporting women in all spheres of life.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic has received its first shipment of more than 130,000 doses from the global COVAX Facility — the first batch of a total of 480,000 doses to arrive in the country this year to vaccinate approximately 20 per cent of the population.
While COVID-19 has highlighted and exacerbated structural inequalities disproportionately affecting females, new approaches are turning the pandemic into an opportunity to boost their involvement in politics and public life, ministers told the Commission on the Status of Women today, as it continued its sixty-fifth session with a morning-long general discussion.
More than 3 billion people globally are at risk of disease because the quality of their rivers, lakes and groundwater is unknown due to a lack of data, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said today. UNEP’s survey of over 75,000 bodies of water in 89 countries found more than 40 per cent severely polluted.
The Commission on the Status of Women continued its sixty-fifth session today, resuming a general discussion and hosting an interactive dialogue via videoconference to investigate how building gender-sensitive COVID-19 response plans can shape more resilient, inclusive communities.
Current and former Government officials, many speaking candidly from personal experience, explored the daily threats faced by women in positions of authority — both offline and in the world’s “new public space”, the Internet — as the Commission on the Status of Women continued its work today.
Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message for the “Target Gender Equality Live” event organized by the United Nations Global Compact, today:
